Backstory

I started these in early September 2020, when my good friend Herbert fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. Herbert was then in his mid-80s. During this first peak of Covid, he was confined in traction to a hospital bed. He and his wife Norma, also a very close friend, both writers, couldn’t collaborate, as they had each night for many years, to invent a story to lull each other to sleep. 

Still deep in grief from my husband’s death almost a year earlier, and isolated from the pandemic, I wrote one for them. My only rule for writing was: no dark. If I started a scene and it began to drift ominous, I stopped, backed up, and rerouted. 

After two weeks Herbert was feeling better enough to talk and Norma said I could stop… but I found composing these helped me relax and feel more aware of the world in welcome ways, both through the writing and the sending, because it was a reliable way to connect each evening in an increasingly detached existence due to the pandemic. 

So I kept up the practice, and a few more friends and acquaintances asked for them, too. 

The first year they were often on the long side and ethereal, shifting as I adjusted to the loss of my husband, coalescing in summer 2021 into a short form following a pattern involving nature, the moon, and the animals listed below, who live (and lived) here with me.